For the past few days, I have been working with some Sales force automation software and in the process I happened to know about few new terms in the domain. To find the definition of these terminologies, I had to search in several sites. Hence putting down the learnings in one place, hoping it might be useful for someone in the future :)

Sales force Automation (SFA) :

It is the technique of using software to automate the sales related tasks - capturing and sharing of lead information, track lead statuses, order tracking, sales forecast analysis, etc.

Prospect :

Prospect is some unknown person, who might be doing a business in the future. Eg: an anonymous visitor visiting your business web site

Lead :

In simple words, a lead is a prospect with a known identity. For example, if you get the email or the telephone number of the afore mentioned web visitor, then he becomes a sales lead. With this identity, more information (say the Company information) about the lead can be collected by doing some web research about the lead.

Contact :

When a sales person begins a conversation with the lead to collect more information about his requirements and also to pitch his solution, the lead becomes a contact. Normally a lead gets converted to Contact manually.

Account :

Account is generally the company or the firm, with whom the sales would be done with. When a lead gets converted into a Contact, his company will become a Account record. Sales Opportunities will be associated with an account.

Opportunity :

Opportunity is the deal that could either be won or lost in the sales process. Hence when a lead gets converted in a contact, opportunities can be created and will be associated with the account.

Campaigns :

These records generally refer the marketing tasks / operations performed to acquire leads into the system. Campaigns usually have some cost or budget associated to them. Conversion of acquired leads to opportunities and the record about winning or losing them, etc can be used to measure the performance of these campaigns.

If you have more definitions to be added to the list, kindly do post them below in the comments section.

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One of the most important tasks during a sales process, is to research about the prospect / lead to get a better understanding of them and their requirements. In this modern internet era, there are plenty of options to get such 360 degree view of a person's online profile at one place. Here is a list of few of the popular tools providing this service: